Today, the Genode OS Framework has seen another feature-rich release, introducing support for hardware-accelerated graphics by the means of Gallium3D, wireless networking via the MadWifi communication stack, a new block-device infrastructure, and Qt4 version 4.6.3. Genode is a modular framework for building special-purpose operating systems, currently supporting 6 different kernels. With the new release, its device-driver coverage reaches a new level and brings the project one step closer towards the goal of shaping Genode to a general-purpose OS.

This is extremely impressive. Several projects, such as Haiku, have ported Gallium, but only the software drivers. The fact that they even ported GEM and the Linux DRM driver is incredible. As I see it, the main two driver issues that prevent alternative OSs from ever being very useful are GPUs and Wifi.

Admittedly, it's only running in user space, in a kind of hack-ish way. Only one program can use the graphics card at a time. But if they could separate out the GEM part into another process, they would be able to have a nice micro-kernel like system so that the graphics driver couldn't crash the kernel, and multiple programs would be able to use it. The main disadvantage would be decreased performance and system integration, which is why Linux has put mode setting in the kernel.